February 25, 2007
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- Today’s Papers
Bomb Outside Baghdad
By Avi Zenilman
Posted Sunday, Feb. 25, 2007, at 7:04 E.T.The New York Times leads with conservative concern about the bona fides of the 2008 Republican presidential candidates. The Washington Post leads local, but gives heavy front-page play to a long story tracking the pre-deployment preparations of an U.S. Army infantry battalion that recently “surged” into Iraq. The Los Angeles Times leads with a look at the oh-so-vulgar tastes of regular moviegoers—the article is basically a dispatch from a multiplex in Long Beach—on the eve of tonight’s Oscars.
The NYT story—which mainly serves to remind us that the religious right is skeptical of Sen. John McCain’s, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s commitment to the cause—sheds light on the existence of the ominous-sounding Council for National Policy, a secretive group of right-wing big shots, ranging from James Dobson to Grover Norquist, that met with all the candidates and then vented its dissatisfaction with them earlier this month at a Florida resort.
The WP followed Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, a heavily decorated battalion commander, as he prepared 800 soldiers for deployment to Iraq. (His battalion surged for Iraq a couple of weeks ago.)
Oddly, none of the papers front news from the western Iraqi city of Habbaniyah, where at least 40 people died in a truck bombing of a Sunni mosque. On Friday, the mosque’s imam had called al-Qaida in Iraq, which is also Sunni, “a bunch of corrupted individuals.” (An NYT Week in Review dispatch from Samarra shows how al-Qaida in Iraq calls the shots in the western Anbar province.)
The NYT fronts a profile of Shiite militia leader Muqtada Sadr, who has toned down his rhetoric and delivered some well-timed personnel changes to adapt to the U.S. surge and flex his political strength. They also note that the son of Shiite politician Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and now the Kurdish President Jalal Talabani, is still calling for punishment of the U.S. soldiers who detained him and allegedly kicked him around Friday. More important, the LAT reports, is the Shiite response (“thousands take to the streets”): Moderates, led by al-Hakim, have found common ground with radical elements in the community usually associated with Sadr.
The LAT has a lonely monopoly on Iran coverage, fronting the news that nearly all the intelligence provided to the United Nations and the IAEA by the United States has been inaccurate. It also reports that an article slated to appear in Monday’s New Yorker will provide details of a war plan for Iran that can go into effect 24 hours after President Bush says “go.”
A long, must-read article in the NYT reveals the inner workings of China’s authoritarian legal system by tracing the rivalry of two public-interest trial lawyers named Li: One believes that political reform can be extracted by legal appeals to sympathetic officials, while the other advocates building a “civilization outside the Communist Party.”
The papers apparently decided to divvy up attendance to the panels at the National Governors Association winter meeting: The LAT reports on concerns of Iraq-related strain on National Guard troop levels, the WP notes that none of the NGA’s members are strong presidential candidates, and the NYT relays complaints—from both Republicans and Democrats—that the federal government is underfunding state Medicaid programs for children.
The WP nicely outlines how Rep. John Murtha, D-Penn., screwed up his introduction of a bill that would tie war funding to especially stringent standards of troop readiness—it intended to make the Democrats look antiwar while staying pro-military, but Murtha unilaterally revealed the bill before a weeklong recess, leaving him open to intra-party criticism and attacks from Republicans.
According to the LAT, an upcoming increase in the application fee for U.S. citizenship (along with a harder citizenship test) and fears of a stiffer immigration law have led to heavily increased applications—nearly 100,000 legal residents applied last month, compared with about 50,000 in January 2006.
The LAT, in an evergreen likely to resurface for the next few decades or so, reports that climate change is facilitating the spread of warm-weather diseases (such as malaria) to new locations and causing epidemiological havoc.
Venezuela has spent $4.3 billion on weapons over the past two years, more than anyone in South America and more than Iran or Pakistan. The NYT quotes a U.S. lieutenant general warning the House intelligence committee of Venezuela’s “agenda to neutralize U.S. influence throughout the hemisphere.” TP wonders what kind of influence America thinks it is currently spreading down south.
Revenge of the Nerds, Sorority Edition: The NYT files a dispatch from the front lines of intrasorority warfare at DePauw University in Indiana, where 23 out of 35 members of a sorority were kicked out by the national chapter for being insufficiently committed. The 23 evictees happened to include every sorority sister who was either overweight or not white, and, to recruit new pledges, the national chapter brought in thinner, blonder ringers from Indiana University down the road. “They had these unassuming freshman girls downstairs with these plastic women from Indiana University, and 25 of my sisters hiding upstairs,” one complained. Six out of the 12 remaining members of Delta Zeta immediately quit, and the campus and the sorority’s national office have since been deluged with protests.
Avi Zenilman is a former Slate intern.- Russia After Putin
James HillThe Un-Candidate: Dmitri Medvedev, first deputy prime minister (and Putin loyalist), has not declared his candidacy. He is nonetheless a front-runner to succeed Putin.
Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York TimesOperation Successor: As with anyone mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, Valentina I. Matviyenko, governor of St. Petersburg (left), and Sergei B. Ivanov, the former defense minister, share a common benefactor: President Vladimir Putin.
Post-Putin
Sergei B. Ivanov walked in late to the holiday performance of the army’s Academy of Song and Dance. He sat in a seat saved for him between a mop-haired boy and a girl with a fluffy white ribbon in her hair. He watched, stiffly tapping his foot, as Soldier Ivan danced with fairies on his way to saving the children’s New Year’s presents from the old witch Baba Yaga. Grandfather Frost Russia‘s Santa Claus arrived in the end, of course, with gifts for the children in the audience, sons and daughters of Russia’s military men. The soldier/actor’s voice boomed as he introduced “a very big present,” “our wonderful guest”: Ivanov, then the country’s minister of defense (and soon to be named first deputy prime minister), the man who might well be the next president of Russia.
“Dear friends,” Ivanov began, his voice tinny by comparison. His face appeared pinched, his lips as thin as the hair parted sharply on the left. Pale, trim, dressed in a dark suit with an open collar, he looked like a secret agent. Which, in fact, is what he was in Finland and Kenya (and maybe in Sweden and England), working for the K.G.B. as the Soviet Union was collapsing. As history shows, a former intelligence officer might be just what Russia wants in a leader.
“It is very pleasant for me today to share your holiday because all adults — and even the minister of defense — were kids sometime,” he went on, awkwardly. “And I remember it well: the smell of fir-tree needles, the fir tree, the smell of mandarins” — famous for ripening in the depth of Russia’s winter — “the fir-tree decorations, which I could not wait to get out of the box and help the adults decorate the New Year tree. I will never forget it.” He is not a natural politician, at least not a politician skilled in the glad-handing, smooth-talking art of campaigning for elected office. He grew up in a country — the Soviet Union — where that was irrelevant.
It might still be. Ivanov, who is 54, is a leading contender to become only the third elected president in Russia’s history, replacing Vladimir V. Putin, the steely, steady president who, according to the country’s adolescent Constitution, must step down early in 2008 after two full terms in office. At least he is presumed to be a contender, just as there is presumed to be an election, scheduled for March 2, 2008.
Ivanov has never expressed the desire to be president — neither in public nor, as far as anyone who knows will tell, in private. Neither has Dmitri A. Medvedev, the other first deputy prime minister and the other presumed-to-be-leading candidate. Nor have Valentina I. Matviyenko, the energetic governor of St. Petersburg; Vladimir I. Yakunin, another former K.G.B. agent who heads the state-owned Russian Railways; Sergei S. Sobyanin, a former governor and the president’s chief of staff; Dmitri N. Kozak, the presidential envoy to the turbulent Caucasus; Boris V. Gryzlov, the speaker of the lower house of Parliament; Sergei M. Mironov, the chairman of the upper house; or Sergei V. Chemizov, director of the state arms-marketing monopoly who served as an intelligence officer with Putin in East Germany.
All have been mentioned as possible successors to Putin, not because they have said anything or even distinguished themselves in any particular way but because they are close to Putin. All, with the exception of Sobyanin, are old friends and allies from his hometown, then Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. No one knows for sure who might emerge as a candidate, because Putin himself will decide, and he has given no indication yet of his final choice. What is certain is that whomever he selects will become the next president of Russia.
Putin’s problem — and it is of his own making — is that it has become impossible to imagine anyone else in charge. His genuine popularity, nourished by the czarlike aura cultivated around him, has smothered any chance for an alternative national leader to emerge, even one of his own choosing. There is a reason that the coming vote is not called the “2008 election” as often as it is the “2008 problem.”
Post-Soviet Russia is still a young country, one attached to a very old history of hereditary and, more recently, nonhereditary transfers of power. The new Russia has had, arguably, only one truly competitive presidential election, meaning that the outcome was not clear beforehand. That was in 1996, when the country’s first president, Boris N. Yeltsin, held off a challenge from the Communist leader, Gennadi A. Zyuganov, after a tainted campaign and vote that nonetheless had the blessing of the democratizing West. An ailing Yeltsin simply anointed Putin his successor, plucking an unknown and untested figure from the secret services to be his prime minister in August 1999 and then four months later to be acting president.
Putin had never been elected anything in his life. And yet he went into his first election in March 2000 as the incumbent (albeit as acting president) and cruised through the process with all the trappings of power, including decisive control of most of television. He beat Zyuganov comfortably in the first round with 52 percent of the vote (bolstered perhaps, as The Moscow Times reported, by ballot stuffing in some regions).
By 2004 he faced a diminished crop of candidates, second-tier party leaders who either expressed support for Putin’s re-election or foundered in oblivion, barred from television appearances and harassed by such government tactics as untimely fire inspections at campaign rallies. It was a rout, one so skewed in favor of Putin — who, officially, won 71 percent — that it became farcical.
Putin has unquestionably transformed the country, righting it, to a degree, after its perilous stagger through the 1990s, when chaos, crime and corruption raged, but he has done so by creating an authoritarian system that is only nominally democratic (in that Russia still holds elections, as the Soviet Union did). He reined in elected governors from the provinces and their representatives in Moscow. He chased into exile or into prison prominent businessmen seen as political challengers. He pulled all of the national television networks back under state control. He so imposed the Kremlin’s will on the legislative bodies that they are now controlled by political parties lacking any real identity except as vassals of Putin. He has been accused of creating a Soviet Union Lite or, alternatively, a new imperial Russia, with himself as a 21st-century czar, a unifying figure above politics, beyond criticism, in absolute control. His supporters dispute this, but there is no question that he has consolidated virtually all political and, increasingly, economic power into his hands, or at least into the hands of the small cadre of aides whom he has entrusted as stewards of the country’s natural resources and strategic enterprises.
Kremlin Inc. has become the name for the hybrid system Putin created: capitalism with an authoritarian face. The search for his replacement has started to look less like a political campaign and more like a boardroom struggle to select a new C.E.O. As at most corporations, the process is out of the public eye, the result presented to shareholders as a fait accompli. And like most executives, Putin is susceptible to choosing someone most like himself. “I don’t think it’s going to be a radical change,” Ivanov said in December.
Announcing one’s own candidacy is, in fact, tantamount to declaring one’s open opposition to the Kremlin, to the smooth transition of power, to Putin himself. Even the parliamentary opposition is wary of doing that. So far in this quasi-election season only two people have done it: a former prime minister, Mikhail M. Kasyanov, and, improbably, Aleksandr V. Donskoi, the youthful mayor of Arkhangelsk, a small port city on the White Sea.
Both promptly came under the scrutiny of prosecutors, even as the mass media piled on in the way they never do with today’s authorities, certainly not the likes of Putin, Ivanov or Medvedev. Kasyanov was accused of arranging the shady privatization of a luxury summer house on the Moscow River, Donskoi of falsifying a university diploma when he first ran for mayor two years ago.
On the day in November when I first met Donskoi in Moscow, intrigued by the audacity of his decision to run for president of all Russia, investigators raided his office up in Arkhangelsk. As we spoke, his wife, Marina, and an aide answered insistent phone calls from home and relayed progress reports. “I realize all the responsibilities,” Donskoi, a supermarket tycoon, told me. “I understand there could be difficulties, including physical threats. It’s already taking place.”
A month later he was back visiting Moscow and called a sparsely attended news conference to denounce an intensifying campaign against him. He denied having falsified his diploma and went on to explain, among other things, his interest in “gypsy hypnosis.” Marina Donskaya interrupted him, having lost patience with the pressure. “He’s not gay!” she shouted, referring to slurs that had been appearing in the Arkhangelsk press. “He impregnated me.”
By February, prosecutors had opened three cases against him. Donskoi, only 36 years old, unknown outside of Arkhangelsk and perhaps better off for it, would stand little chance in a real campaign to be the leader of a country as sprawling, complex and deeply troubled as Russia. That’s not the point. The point is that Putin’s Russia does not dare to hold an open competition for the highest office in the land — one where even a long shot like Donskoi could at least make a case for himself. That, more than anything else Putin has done, is the biggest threat to democracy.
“All of us believed in the new, democratic Russia,” Kasyanov, the other upstart candidate, told me. He served as Putin’s prime minister from 2000 to 2004, representing the continuity from the presidency of Boris N. Yeltsin. On the eve of his re-election, though, Putin sacked him, setting him adrift in political obscurity to ward off prosecutors, so far successfully. From an office tower in southern Moscow, Kasyanov now runs a consultancy devoted mostly to his campaign. A large telescope stands beside an enormous plate-glass window. It points at the Kremlin.
“There is no possibility for a free and fair election,” he said, his tone evoking those democrats and liberals who once occupied positions of influence inside the Kremlin during the 1990s but now sound simply discouraged. “Right now there is an issue of the survival of the democratic state.”
Last year, Putin said that he had been thinking about his replacement from the moment he became president in 2000, but Operation Successor, as it has been called, began in earnest in November 2005, when the Kremlin announced that Putin had given promotions to two of his closest aides, loyal men he brought to Moscow with him when he began his rise to power in the 1990s: Dmitri Medvedev and Sergei Ivanov.
Medvedev had previously served as his chief of staff and chairman of a huge state-owned utility, Gazprom, which he still is. He became first deputy prime minister, a newly created position under Prime Minister Mikhail Y. Fradkov, a jowly bureaucrat whose three years in office have been notable for a lack of influence. Ivanov, Putin’s comrade and eventual superior in the Soviet K.G.B., became deputy prime minister — a rung below Medvedev — having served as head of the state security council and, significantly, the first civilian minister of defense in Russia’s (and the Soviet Union’s) history. Like Putin, neither has ever been elected to office.
While it was never stated, the significance was clear: both were being groomed for higher office. When I asked Aleksandr Y. Lebedev, a former K.G.B. officer, member of Russia’s lower house of Parliament and one of the world’s richest men, about Operation Successor, he suggested I watch television. His advice recalls the old cold warriors analyzing the array of Soviet leaders on Red Square’s grandstand: Kremlinology on the nightly news. Lebedev could tell that Putin’s mind was not yet made up. “You can take a chronometer,” he said when we met in November. “If one is given seven minutes, the other will be given seven minutes.”
The news is not as propagandistic as it was in Soviet times, but it has also ceased to be a forum for a national discussion or debate on matters involving politics and Putin personally. He is never criticized. His two anointed aides receive the same deference. Ivanov and Medvedev now appear almost as often as Putin and certainly more than their nominal boss, Prime Minister Fradkov. They preside over meetings of ministers, make statements, explain to ordinary Russians the duties the president has assigned to them. Anything critical — say, questions about the exoneration of Ivanov’s son, Aleksandr, after his car struck and killed a pedestrian — never appears.
Few Ivanov or Medvedev events pass unheralded. Ivanov’s appearance at the army’s holiday concert was utterly inconsequential, yet it appeared on the evening news programs on all three state networks anyway. Rossiya, one of the state channels, even repeated an expanded version on its prime time news. Two children asked him to let the troupe perform for the military in Vladikavkaz, the southern city that has served as the staging base for troops waging war in Chechnya. Of course, Ivanov promised — as long as the performers on the stage beside him agreed. (The performance had already been scheduled.) Not long after the New Year, the troupe performed in Vladikavkaz and again was featured on the news, along with a reminder of the man who had made sure it happened.
Ivanov seems, in person, far more pragmatic and less prone to nationalistic declarations than his public statements would lead you to expect. At a dinner in late December with foreign reporters, he outlined a reasoned view of geopolitics and his own goals for modernizing Russia’s military. Ivanov rose through the ranks of the K.G.B. and its successor agencies, including the foreign intelligence service and the Federal Security Service. Still, ever since he met Putin in 1977 while both were studying to be K.G.B. officers — “I don’t want to go into the details,” he said — his public prominence has owed itself to Putin’s rise to power.
When it came to his own future, he demurred. “I do not think about it,” he said. “You may not believe it, but I don’t. The presidential campaign hasn’t started,” he added, crossing himself as the Russian Orthodox do, “and I hope it won’t start for a long time.”
It was hard to believe this diffidence when, a few weeks later, I joined him on a visit to an artillery training base and a MiG testing facility in Kolomna, two hours southeast of Moscow. He touted his plan to create family advisory councils to combat abuse and corruption and his negotiations to sell the newest MiG 35 to India. Both are ostensibly chores of Ivanov’s current job, but his trip to a youth hockey championship in a small city, Sudogda, sponsored by a youth sports organization that he created, called New Generation, was nothing more than image building. It was all on the news again, with Ivanov appearing in one instance before a military recruiting poster. “Make Your Choice,” it said.
Ivanov is portrayed as a hard-liner, part of the clan of Putin aides known as the siloviki, or people of power. Medvedev is the (comparatively) liberal, democratic reformer, from the clan representing the modernizing businessmen. Both are oversimplifications, since their singular positions are entirely dependent on their close, personal relations with and loyalty to Putin, who is unquestionably in charge. Having (apparently) launched Operation Successor, he later suggested that there could be still more candidates. “Yes, that’s possible, especially since the list is not very long,” he said in Shanghai last June. Pressed if it could be a dark horse, someone unknown, someone like he was under Yeltsin, he threw out more bait. “Completely unknown?” he said. “Not really. Such people are known to everyone, but their names are simply not mentioned.”
Valentina I. Matviyenko has, in fact, been mentioned — as someone who could be the first woman to rule Russia since Catherine the Great. She has been governor of St. Petersburg, Russia’s second city, since Putin removed her predecessor and cleared the way for her election in 2003. A former apparatchik in the Communist Party, she became a diplomat, serving as ambassador to Malta when the Soviet Union was falling apart and then to Greece during Yeltsin’s presidency, before becoming a deputy prime minister in 1998. As governor, she has demonstrated unwavering loyalty to Putin, even when he ended direct elections of governors like her following the Beslan siege in 2004. In a magazine interview at the time, she declared that Russians were not ready for experiments with electoral democracy. “The mentality of the Russian demands a lord, a czar, a president,” she said.
When I met her in December, Matviyenko expressed disdain for electoral politics. Her own election campaign in 2003 she called “the most difficult point in my life,” and she deplored the “dirty side” of elections: money and lies, understandably, but also what she derided as the “million promises” made by her opponent, as though campaign promises were somehow inappropriate. She said that legislative bodies should be elected, but executive power could not risk elections. “This is because, unfortunately, if a mistake is made during the elections, it would be practically impossible to correct it during the official’s term,” she told me in her office inside Smolny Institute, built in the 19th century as a school for the daughters of Russian nobility.
She is no longer accountable to the voters, to the people. Putin’s post-Beslan decree means that she, like governors or presidents of Russia’s 88 regions, serves at his will, ratified by the local legislative assembly. (Not one has balked at any of Putin’s choices.) When I asked her about 2008 and her own prospects as a candidate, she said she would take herself out of the running: she had work yet to do in St. Petersburg. To end speculation, she explained, she would resign, which she in fact did two days later. She then petitioned Putin for a vote of confidence. He obliged a day later, reappointing her to a new term. On Dec. 20, the city’s Parliament, following a speech by another of Putin’s potential successors, Sergei Sobyanin, voted 40 to 3 to confirm the president’s choice. Matviyenko began a new term as governor that will last until the end of 2011, when, unless something revolutionary happens in the meantime, Putin’s chosen successor will reconsider her appointment.
Her reappointment showed how seamlessly Putin has imposed order on the unpredictable whims of electoral politics, removing chance, surprise and competition. “People do not want any more revolutions,” Matviyenko told me in the Smolny Institute, which Lenin chose as his headquarters during the Bolshevik revolution and where he lived and worked in two modest rooms, preserved to this day as they were in 1917. “People want the quiet development of the country, stable development, without shake-ups. They would like to see a president who can guarantee the succession of power.”
By late January, according to the buzz, a front-runner had emerged. Dmitri Medvedev led a large delegation of Russians to the World Economic Forum, the annual gathering of the world’s business and political elite in Davos, Switzerland. Compared with Ivanov, Medvedev remains largely unknown outside Russia. He is only 41 years old, a boyish lawyer, co-author of a textbook on civil law and lecturer at St. Petersburg State University’s School of Law, Putin’s alma mater. He has served as an aide to Putin for 15 years now, ever since both worked for St. Petersburg’s governor, Anatoly A. Sobchak, who was among the most vocal advocates of democracy and economic reforms even before the Soviet collapse. His rise to the second-highest post in government is inseparable from Putin’s rise to the presidency. Davos was his foreign coming-out party, one so successful that analysts in Moscow declared Operation Successor complete.
“Russia is a country that, in the 20th century, was subjected to hard trials, revolutions, civil war, world wars and economic collapse,” Medvedev said in Davos, concluding a detailed exposition in Russian of Putin’s economic and political policies with a passage in stilted but fluent English. “Today we are building new institutions based on the fundamental principles of full-fledged democracy.”
On an icy day earlier this month, I followed him on one of the routine working visits so prominently featured on the nightly news — in this case to Veliki Novgorod, the ancient Russian city 300 miles northwest of Moscow. The trip included visits to a children’s clinic, a new subdivision and a mortgage center, all beneficiaries of the “national projects.” He basked in the praise of the officials he met, but he also faced polite queries on the need for more financing and on certain unintended consequences of the national-project policy. It seemed very much like Dmitri Medvedev’s Listening Tour. At a meeting with regional leaders and businessmen, he heard that prices for construction materials in the region skyrocketed following the government’s plan to build affordable housing. At Children’s Clinic No. 3, renovated for the first time in 30 years, a nurse noted that only three babies had been born who were actually eligible for the new grants intended to stimulate the birth rate and halt the country’s alarming population decline.
Medvedev jotted notes, fidgeted, shuffled papers; he often speaks to the floor or table in front of him. Physically, he is not an imposing figure: short and compact, and having lost weight over the last year, he is very much like Putin. He commands detail like his mentor, and with increasing confidence.
At the clinic, Medvedev acknowledged that much work remained to be done, but he boasted that the “national projects” were working. “This kind of quick rehabilitation of medical institutions has never occurred in history,” he said in remarks broadcast that night.
The one thing not mentioned until the end of the day was Medvedev’s future. His aide, Zhanna Odintsova, even took polite exception when I suggested the trips had the feel of a political campaign. She also told me that while I could attend the day’s last event — a roundtable interview with journalists from the neighboring regions — I did not “have the right to ask a question.” So I planted my question with a willing colleague, Alyona Khozova, a correspondent with Ren TV in Vologda.
After an hour of questions about the national projects, about his hobbies (he swims every evening and tries to teach his son to distinguish right from wrong) and about his plans to visit various regions, Khozova asked the final question. “Lately the topic of a successor to Vladimir Putin has been circulating,” she began.
That was as far as she got. Medvedev cut her off with a laugh. “I am not now working on anything directly,” he said. “I am engaged completely with those affairs that we just discussed. And I like this work. It surprises me in a good way. I experience a kind of ‘drive,’ if you will, from these activities and will take that which I have received to its logical conclusion.”
Putin’s greatest legacy would be a smooth succession of power, still a rare occurrence in a country with the violent, authoritarian past that Russia has. History might ultimately judge him as Russia’s George Washington, the man who did not let the possibility of retaining personal power overrule a young country’s laws and democratic principles. Still, there are those who wish that he would stay, that the Constitution would be amended to allow him to run for a third term he would undoubtedly win. He could do so easily, given the unwavering obsequiousness of Parliament. Regional Parliaments across Russia have drafted referendums on the issue from Primoriye on the Pacific Coast to Chechnya, the battered ruin of a republic whose war for secession Putin has effectively crushed, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives.
“We think that Putin should complete both the political and economic reforms that he began and should have at minimum two more terms — three or four more terms,” the speaker of Chechnya’s Parliament, Dukuvakha B. Abdurakhmanov, told me by telephone in mid-January. Chechnya’s petition by that point had already garnered the support of two dozen of Russia’s regions, raising the possibility the issue could yet come to a vote in the Parliament. “The number of terms should not decide the end of his presidency, but rather his age and health.”
Putin continues to demur, even as he opens the door for speculation. “As for myself, as I have said, the Constitution — even though I like my work — the Constitution does not give me a right to stand for a third consecutive term,” he said in an annual televised call-in program in October. His use of “consecutive” prompted many to believe he might yet come back for re-election in 2012.
Part of what fuels the uncertainty surrounding the succession is what Putin will do once a second term ends. He will be only 55. It is hard to imagine him slipping into quiet retirement. Speculation abounds that he intends to remain an unelected power, overseeing the country from behind the scenes. He could take over a party (though he has yet to join one), become the speaker of Parliament or emerge as the leader of the as-yet unrealized union of Belarus and Russia. Rumor has long had it that he could take over Gazprom, the huge state gas and oil company, now one of the world’s largest corporations and still growing. He could reap the rewards that his authoritarian capitalism has brought Russia, though he once said he was not a businessman by temperament.
On Feb. 1, Putin held his annual full-dress press conference and swatted aside repeated questions about his successor and his future. “There will be no successor,” he said. “There will be candidates for the post of president of Russia.” He did not mention Medvedev, Ivanov or the others, not once, which prompted a new round of speculation that the speculation about Medvedev and Ivanov had, perhaps, been misplaced. Pressed, he would say only that he reserved the right to express a choice. “But I will do it only when the election campaign starts,” he said.
By strict letter of the law, campaigns in Russia last only 30 days. Putin could put off his endorsement, as it were, until the last minute. In the meantime, he is keeping people guessing. On Feb. 15, he unexpectedly promoted Ivanov to the same rank as Medvedev, giving Russia two first deputy prime ministers and shifting the buzz yet again.
Opposition to Putin exists. In December, Andrei N. Illarionov, a former economic adviser of Putin’s until he resigned more than a year ago to protest the government’s authoritarianism, described the succession process as something out of the Middle Ages. “It does not matter what kind of successor one is, smart or not too smart, a pleasant one or not too pleasant,” he said at a news conference. “It does not matter. The choice between this and that makes no sense. One thing matters. It is that the transfer of power to one’s heir should not happen in a modern, civilized and normal country.” There are candidates who will run against Putin’s chosen heir, representing the greatly diminished Communist Party or the Liberal Democratic Party, whose nationalist leader, Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, has long ago ceased opposing the Kremlin. But they will enjoy none of the advantages of Putin’s heir, and they will lose.
Still, Valentina Matviyenko might be right. Russians are not in a revolutionary mood now that the country is more stable, now that salaries and pensions are paid, now that consumers can indulge in everything Europeans can — except political choice.
In December, the authorities refused to grant a permit for a march organized by Other Russia, an amalgam of disaffected political organizations, including one created by Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion who retired in 2005 to wage a lonely campaign to make Russia politically free. The authorities authorized only a rally, to be held on Triumphal Square. Four days before it, the interior ministry’s counterterrorism police raided Kasparov’s office and seized posters advertising the march. As I approached on the morning of the rally, truckloads of soldiers lined every street in the area; a helicopter hovered overhead. Street sweepers, snowplows and buses blocked the main street while soldiers stood in formation, two layers deep.
Inside a fenced area were perhaps 2,000 protesters; organizers’ estimates of 4,000 or more were exaggerated. The organizers later said that hundreds of participants had been stopped at checkpoints on the roads or at train stations. Those who made it included aging liberals of Mikhail S. Gorbachev‘s Glasnost, now 20 years past, and radical youth, including the committed members of two organizations, the National Bolsheviks, known for stunts like being arrested while occupying government offices, and the Red Youth Vanguard, whose red-and-black flag incorporates an AK-47. The police and soldiers on hand outnumbered them by four to one or more.
“They are afraid that one day we will say, ‘Enough,’ ” Kasparov yelled from the back of a flatbed truck with a Dolce & Gabbana billboard as a backdrop. His voice was drowned out by the chopping thud of the helicopter overhead. He led a chant — “We need the Other Russia,” after the movement’s name — but the chants faded after a couple of rounds.
Steven Lee Myers is the Times bureau chief in Moscow. He last wrote for the magazine about the 2006 elections in Belarus.
- Sam Nunn’s Nightmares
Photomontage by Peter Hapak
Mikhail Metzel/Associated PressHazmat World: Sam Nunn, left, at a metal plant in Kazakhstan in 2005 to check on the “blending down” of 6,400 pounds of highly enriched uranium
The Stuff Sam Nunn’s Nightmares Are Made Of
Correction Appended
By now we can too readily imagine the horror of terrorists exploding a nuclear weapon in a major American city: the gutted skyscrapers, the melted cars, the charred bodies. For Sam Nunn, however, a new terror begins the day after. That’s when the world asks whether another bomb is out there. “If a nuclear bomb went off in Moscow or New York City or Jerusalem, any number of groups would claim they have another,” Nunn told me recently. These groups would make steep demands as intelligence officials scrambled to determine which claims were real. Panic would prevail. Even after the detonation of a small, crude weapon that inflicted less damage than the bomb at Hiroshima, Nunn suggested, “the psychological damage would be incalculable. It would be a slow, step-by-step process to regain confidence. And the question will be, Why didn’t we take steps to prevent this? We will have a whole list of things we wish we’d done.”
Nunn thinks of those things every time he picks up a newspaper. When, for instance, he reads about the arrest of a Russian man who, in a sting operation, tried to sell weapons-grade uranium — a reminder of a possible black market in nuclear materials and of the poor security at facilities in the former Soviet Union. Or when he sees news about Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear bomb, which could set off a wave of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and thus significantly raise the possibility that terrorists will someday acquire a bomb. And despite the apparent diplomatic breakthrough with North Korea earlier this month, in which the North Koreans agreed to begin dismantling their nuclear facilities in return for fuel and other aid, Nunn, who finds the deal encouraging, remains concerned since North Korea’s unpredictable, cash-starved dictatorship still retains perhaps half a dozen nuclear bombs, and the ingredients to make more.
A decade after leaving the United States Senate, where he spent years as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Nunn posed one, overriding question about his list of things we’ll wish we had done if a doomsday should ever come: “Why aren’t we doing them now?” In a sense, his own answer has been to help found and run the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based foundation largely bankrolled by Nunn’s friends Ted Turner and Warren Buffett. In what may be the most ambitious example of private dollars subsidizing national security, the N.T.I. is trying to fill in the gaps where government is failing to reduce nuclear threats. In other words, to do the things now that we would otherwise wish we had done.
The war in Iraq has understandably consumed America’s foreign-policy energies. But it occludes what Nunn and many others, on both the right and left, regard as a deepening worldwide nuclear crisis. Despite its willingness to confront North Korea, the U.S., Nunn insists, still does not fully grasp the nuclear dangers it faces. “We are at a tipping point,” he says. “And we are headed in the wrong direction.” As he sees it, the trouble is, in a defense establishment that once war-gamed the end of the world a thousand different ways, there has been a shortage of thinking about what the right direction looks like or how to take it. It is a situation that has led Nunn, who once extolled nuclear weapons as a guarantor of American safety, to reassess decades of hawkish cold-war thinking, to reconsider his most fundamental beliefs about whether the country would be safer in a world with any nuclear weapons at all.
Sam Nunn’s nuclear nightmare begins with a character like Oleg Khinsagov. Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed that officials in the former Soviet republic of Georgia had arrested Khinsagov, a 50-year-old Russian fish and sausage trader, for attempting to sell 100 grams of highly enriched uranium to a Muslim buyer who, Khinsagov had been told, represented “a serious organization.” The price: $1 million. Khinsagov, who was caught in a sting operation, had nowhere near enough material for a bomb, but he claimed to have far more at his apartment. (Whether he actually did is unclear.) An American laboratory analysis indicates that the material most likely originated at a Russian nuclear facility.
To some, Khinsagov’s arrest was a success story, a sign that recent efforts to crack down on nuclear smuggling are producing results. Nunn is not so sanguine. He says that nuclear smugglers who get caught — the international agency counts 18 confirmed cases involving highly enriched uranium and plutonium since 1993 — are usually unsophisticated amateurs. “It’s the ones we don’t see that worry me,” he says.
It is a worry that he shares with Ted Turner, the billionaire philanthropist and founder of CNN whose donation of $250 million in Time Warner stock enabled the Nuclear Threat Initiative to open for business in 2001. Turner long dreaded a nuclear holocaust, but he assumed the threat had fizzled out with the end of the cold war. “I was getting ready to celebrate the millennium in 2000 because it looked like humanity was going to make it,” he told me, when we spoke last month. “And if we could do that, maybe we could make it to 3000. I figured that we had nuclear disarmament.” And then he saw a report on “60 Minutes” about lax security in the former Soviet Union. There were 20,000 warheads and stockpiles of uranium and plutonium capable of making another 40,000 or more warheads scattered across 11 time zones, whose safety too often depended on lackadaisical guards, shabby locks and defective security cameras. There was another related problem: large quantities of uranium that could be used to make bombs were being stored at some 130 civilian nuclear reactors around the world, often under even more slipshod security. A small group of terrorists might break into such a facility and if they had basic engineering and chemistry skills could probably forge a crude nuclear bomb out of a grapefruit-size 30-pound lump of highly enriched uranium (to say nothing of a much simpler radioactive “dirty” bomb).
Turner considered establishing an organization to revive the dormant nuclear-disarmament movement. But foreign-policy specialists he met with persuaded him to focus on more realistic, incremental change. A mutual friend connected Turner with Nunn, who was then practicing law at an Atlanta firm. According to one person familiar with N.T.I.’s founding, who does not want to be named because he works with N.T.I. and does not have permission to speak on its behalf, “There was this very prolonged dance where people were trying to come up with ideas that were exciting enough for Turner but sensible enough for Nunn,” who was uncomfortable with Turner’s passion for disarmament, a movement Nunn had long considered irresponsible.
Nunn and Turner found common ground, however, in a narrower mission: responding to the threat of “loose nukes,” or the possibility that nuclear weapons and materials might be smuggled out of the former Soviet Union and find their way into malevolent hands. They settled on having the Nuclear Threat Initiative spend millions of dollars on everything from annual reports written by Harvard academics on the loose-nukes problem to filming a docudrama about a nuclear-terrorism crisis. Above all, the foundation would finance direct-action programs to secure nuclear materials around the world, in coordination with the U.S. and foreign governments.
It was one such program that led Nunn and Turner to a warehouse in Ust-Kamenogorsk, an industrial city in eastern Kazakhstan, in October 2005. They were there to size up an effort, paid for in part by N.T.I., to “blend down” 6,400 pounds of highly enriched uranium — enough to make dozens of bombs — into a form that couldn’t be used in weapons. The uranium was spent fuel from a decommissioned nuclear power plant situated near the Iranian border. A few years earlier, he had made the following offer to Kazakhstan’s president: N.T.I. would provide its expertise to relocate and then blend down the uranium, and it would pay half of the $2 million cost to do so. By the time Nunn and Turner toured the Ulba Metallurgical Plant, the project was close to completion. A portion of the uranium had not yet been blended down, however, and it lay stored in 20 or so tubes in a corner of the warehouse. Nunn and Turner stood and gazed solemnly at it. “Here was the potential, right there in that little corner, in the hands of the wrong people, to wipe out cities around the world.” Nunn says. “That’s a pretty stark realization.”
N.T.I. intervened in Kazakhstan, Nunn explains, because the U.S. government did not act first. It’s not the only such example: in mid-2002, more than 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium — stored in portable canisters that emit little radiation — was lying at the Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences, a civilian research reactor in Belgrade. The security there would have been no match for even a small terrorist squad. And Islamic militants operated in the region. Clearly Vinca was a high-priority problem. Yet even though the first American plans to rescue the material were drawn up during the Clinton administration, no action had been taken a year after Sept. 11. The obstacle was bureaucratic: in return for giving up the uranium, the Serbian government demanded help cleaning up Vinca’s spent reactor fuel. That qualified as an environmental cleanup, however, which the U.S. lacked the authority to pay for. So N.T.I. stepped in and covered the $5 million cleanup fee. It wasn’t until August 2002 that a motorcade of technicians and machine-gun-toting commandos finally transferred the uranium from the Vinca Institute to a cargo plane that flew it to Russia to be blended down.
“If there’s anything that most Americans would think the government would happily chip in for, it’s getting highly enriched uranium out of a place where it could fall into terrorist hands,” says Matthew Bunn, a former nuclear-arms official in the Clinton administration who is now at Harvard and whose work is partly financed by N.T.I. “Yet” — in Vinca — “the government could not get this done without N.T.I.’s money.”
A small-town lawyer and politician who won an underdog campaign in Georgia in 1972, Nunn quickly made his name in Washington as a defense-policy wonk. Thanks to an intimidating expertise on defense affairs and a bespectacled air of judicious authority, Nunn was “looked upon with awe” by colleagues in both parties, says Pete V. Domenici, the Republican senator from New Mexico. Such was his authority, in fact, that he comfortably rebuffed offers from George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton to serve as secretary of defense, knowing that he wielded even more power from his longtime perch as chairman of Senate Armed Services. Nunn used that influence to consistently pro-military ends. During the 1970s, he fought with liberal Democrats seeking to cut defense budgets and ultimately forced Jimmy Carter to accept substantial increases in defense spending. Nunn also strongly defended the value and morality of nuclear weapons. The nuclear-freeze movement, in his mind, was naïvely utopian. “We had to have a nuclear deterrent,” he says today. “Not only that, but a first-use policy,” which refers to the U.S.’s stated willingness in certain circumstances to strike first with nuclear weapons.
Nunn considered a run for president in 1988, and his name surfaced again after Michael Dukakis’s crushing defeat in November of that year, which further persuaded centrist Democrats that they needed a Southern moderate as a candidate. But that talk ground to a halt after Nunn opposed the first gulf war. He urged at the time that sanctions and diplomacy be given more time and, in January 1991, voted against the Senate’s war resolution. A sign went up on a Georgia highway calling him “Saddam’s Best Friend,” and some suggested that he was cynically appealing to liberal Democratic primary voters. As it happened, however, opposing such a short and easy war probably ruined Nunn’s shot at the White House. In Washington, his vote was considered a colossal political blunder. “He got a lot of political flak,” says his friend Al From, the chairman of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council. “It probably hastened his decision to retire from politics.” (Nunn’s vote “profoundly influenced the next generation of senators that confronted plans for the second invasion” 11 years later, says a former Clinton defense official who advises Congressional Democrats. White House officials even invoked Nunn’s “mistake” as they lobbied Congress to vote for war.)
By the mid-1990s, the cold war was over and the stature of defense gurus diminished. Moreover, politics on Capitol Hill were changing. The rise of fierce, Gingrich-style cultural politics made life uneasy for all Southern Democrats. In 1993, Nunn resisted Bill Clinton’s attempt to allow gays to serve openly in the military, prompting a gay-rights spokesman to brand him a “Jesse Helms Democrat.” Washington was growing far less hospitable to a moderate with little taste for the blood sport of partisan politics. “The premium is on stirring up your base,” he says now. When Nunn announced his retirement in 1995, even the Republican Strom Thurmond urged him to stick around. Nunn was just 58 when he left the Senate. For more than 20 years, his life had been defined by the cold war and the fight against Communism. That cause was over.
Nunn first became alarmed by the threat of loose nukes during his last Senate term. A year after the Soviet Union began to collapse in 1990, he passed legislation with his friend Richard Lugar, the Republican from Indiana, that dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars annually in the Pentagon budget to the dismantling of surplus Soviet nuclear weapons, upgrading security at nuclear sites in the former Soviet Union and finding jobs for its nuclear scientists lest they be tempted to work for terrorists or would-be nuclear powers. Since 1991, the Cooperative Threat Reduction program — or simply Nunn-Lugar, as it is generally known — has spent more than $10 billion on its mission, and it is considered a triumph of forward-looking lawmaking.
Even so, huge quantities of weapons and material remain in what Nunn considers perilously unsafe conditions. Only about half of the buildings containing nuclear material in the former Soviet Union have undergone post-1990 security upgrades to install things like perimeter fences, cameras and radiation-monitors to prevent theft. And 134 tons of excess plutonium, which the Russians are willing to destroy, are just sitting in storage. Progress in addressing these problems has been stymied in part by conservatives in the last Republican Congress who bristled at the notion of sending American tax dollars to a Russian military that, they said, should pay for its own fences and cameras. Cooler relations between Russia and the United States have stalled matters further. Russian military officials are less willing to let Americans poke around their nuclear sites and assess security conditions. And the uncompromising diplomacy of the Bush administration has played a role too. American and Russian officials recently fought over arcane rules that would govern a program to dispose of that 134 tons of excess plutonium. The lead United States negotiator demanded extremely broad guarantees for U.S. contractors involved in the work, including freedom from liability even in the event of intentional spillage of nuclear material. The standoff delayed the program for more than a year, until Bush and Vladimir Putin finally hammered out a solution at a summit last fall.
One of the few points of agreement between George Bush and John Kerry during the presidential campaign in 2004 was that preventing a terrorist nuclear attack is among America’s very highest priorities. But many critics on both the left and right argue that the Bush administration has lacked a sense of urgency toward the threat of loose nukes. Kenneth Adelman, a former Reagan-era arms-control official and a Pentagon adviser under George W. Bush, recently recalled a private meeting with Donald Rumsfeld days after his swearing in as defense secretary. “He was very skeptical of the Nunn-Lugar program,” Adelman told me. “That wasn’t the kind of thing he thought the Department of Defense should be doing. He had it in his head that it was a wimpy thing to have the Pentagon involved in.”
Some Bush allies maintain that the real blame lies with Russia’s increasingly belligerent leader. “I believe there are still many installations where the security of materials is still not to the high level that we would hope,” John Wolf, who served as assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation in Bush’s first term, told me. “Somebody ought to look into Mr. Putin’s eyes and down to his soul and say, ‘You’re putting the fate of the world at risk by your unwillingness to take action.’ “
Last September, Nunn and N.T.I.’s president, a former Energy Department official in the Clinton administration named Charles Curtis, flew to Vienna to meet with Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. ElBaradei admires Nunn, whom he calls “a shining example” in the fight against a potential nuclear catastrophe — presumably not least because N.T.I. has given ElBaradei’s agency more than $1 million to upgrade its monitoring of nuclear material worldwide. Part of the reason for Nunn’s visit was to discuss a major new N.T.I. proposal: the creation of an international nuclear fuel bank.
This was the foundation’s response to an unsettling wave of countries showing interest in new or expanded nuclear capabilities. Several nations, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria, say they might want to develop civilian nuclear power. Meanwhile, South Africa, Brazil, Canada, Argentina and Australia all talk of creating home-grown uranium-enrichment programs — ostensibly for power but potentially also for military ends. “What I see is a new wave of countries not necessarily trying to develop nuclear weapons but nuclear-weapons capability — the ability to process or enrich plutonium or uranium,” ElBaradei told me recently. “And I know, and you know, that if a country is capable of doing that, they are virtually a nuclear-weapon state.”
The idea behind an international fuel bank is to make it possible for nations to generate nuclear power without developing a nuclear-weapons capability. Iran, for instance, has rejected offers from Russia to manage its uranium supply on the alleged grounds that it doesn’t want to be dependent on Russia’s political whims for its energy needs. The fuel bank would render such complaints obsolete and make transparent who is using energy programs as a cover for military ambitions. If a country has access to a reliable fuel supply, why would it need its own enrichment program?
For Nunn, this is the logical next phase in the fight against loose nukes: preventing the creation of new nukes that could become loose someday. ElBaradei has predicted that as many as 30 or 40 countries could begin trying to develop nuclear capability in coming years. And while traditional policies of deterrence may keep future nuclear states in check, every new bomb factory necessarily means there is more dangerous nuclear material in the world. “I see the two going together,” Nunn says. “The more countries that have this fissile material, the more likely the risk of a diversion or theft of fissile material becomes.”
America was lucky to survive the cold war, Nunn told an audience in Washington last month. “I don’t believe if you get another 7, 8, 10 countries with a nuclear weapon that you’re going to be so lucky.”
It is very likely that North Korea’s success in building weapons and Iran’s steady progress toward that goal have only encouraged other nations to get into the nuclear game. But, Nunn believes, the United States, mired in Iraq and strained in its relations with former allies, has never had less leverage to counter them. Nunn says that the current Iraq war (which he also opposed) has distracted U.S. officials, undermined the credibility of any U.S. military threat it might bring to bear on North Korean or Iran and “dealt a severe blow to the leadership credibility we need in the world.”
In this view, American credibility is an essential part of persuading other nations to stop or reverse their nuclear programs. One way to enhance American credibility, according to this line of thinking, is for the United States to decrease its own nuclear stockpile. Yet the Bush administration has not only not moved to significantly reduce that stockpile, it is also exploring new nuclear technologies (like bunker-buster mini-nukes). “I think we have very badly failed to meet our responsibilities,” Brent Scowcroft, George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser and Nunn’s friend, told me. “I think it is the sort of neoconish notion that it is our job to dominate the world and that the way you dominate it is by pushing ahead on new nuclear stuff.”
Nunn complains that the Bush White House also subordinates nonproliferation to other goals. As an example, he cites the deal the administration cut with India last year. It created a legal exemption allowing American companies to conduct trade with India’s nuclear-power industry even though India is not a party to the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty. Nunn publicly called for Congress to impose conditions on the deal — specifically, a provision requiring that India halt production of new fissile material for weapons. A worldwide treaty barring the creation of all new fissile material is near the top of Nunn’s wish list, and he saw the deal with India as a fine opportunity. But in the end, the Bush administration, which is eager to cultivate India as a regional ally, got its way. “We missed that opportunity,” Nunn says. “We should not have entered into that agreement.”
The Bush administration is not without its achievements or its defenders. Persuading Libya to abandon a nascent nuclear program in 2003 is one of its least-heralded triumphs. The recent deal with North Korea, if it holds up, could be another success story. The Global Threat Reduction Initiative, a program set up by the Energy Department to remove nuclear material from civilian nuclear reactors around the world, has been widely commended. (Nunn, who is not prone to boasting, says people “at very high levels” have told him that the example set by the Vinca operation in Serbia was a crucial impetus behind the creation of the new program.) Meanwhile, conservatives note that the sorts of international treaties embraced by Nunn but spurned by Bush have historically failed to blunt the nuclear ambitions of states like India and Pakistan and, now, possibly Iran. Hence American power and the deterrent threat of brute force remain the best way to confront the dangers of proliferation. “If you want to discourage countries from acquiring nuclear weapons,” Richard Perle, the former Reagan arms-control official, says, “make it clear that once they get a nuclear weapon, it is something they can’t use directly because we will annihilate them.”
Nunn, for one, remains unconvinced. The North Korea deal, he says, came about after the Bush administration shifted tactics from its confrontational, axis-of-evil posture to intensive multilateral diplomacy. While Nunn says he applauds the administration for changing direction on North Korea — “You have to talk to countries unless you’re going to leave yourself with one resort, which is military force,” he says — Perle’s vision of deterrence is ineffective if a nuclear weapon is stolen or transferred from a state to a terrorist group with no fixed address to incinerate. It is potential threats like these that have led Nunn to shift his focus from locking up loose nukes to grander ideas, like the international fuel bank.
At the same time, he has had to enlist new allies. Ted Turner’s initial donation of $250 million to the Nuclear Threat Initiative came in the form of Time Warner stock, which lost 70 percent of its value before N.T.I. sold it off. N.T.I. might have gone under by now had Nunn not enlisted another wealthy angel, Warren Buffett. Nunn has known Buffett for years through his service on the Coca-Cola corporate board — Nunn estimates he spends 30 to 50 percent of his time serving on several corporate boards, including those of Coca-Cola, Dell and Chevron — and Buffett has long been concerned about the risk of nuclear terrorism.
“One thing you learn in the insurance business is that anything that can happen will happen,” Buffett told me. “Whether it’s the levees in New Orleans or the San Francisco earthquake, things that are very improbable do happen.” Buffett once gave Nunn a formula that the latter likes to repeat: assuming a 10 percent chance of a nuclear attack in any given year, the odds of surviving 50 years without an attack are less than 1 percent. If the odds of an attack can be reduced to 1 percent per year, however, the chances of making it 50 years without a nuclear detonation improve to better than even. Buffett also told Nunn that if he ever had “a big idea” for reducing the chances of nuclear terrorism, he should call. After Nunn proposed the fuel-bank project, Buffett backed the effort with a pledge of $50 million — on the condition that at least one government contributes $100 million in cash or nuclear fuel within two years. Buffett is now N.T.I.’s chief underwriter, promising to donate $7 million annually to the foundation through 2009. (Fund-raising generates the rest of N.T.I.’s money.) “I told Sam we’re not going to have something as important as his effort disappear because of the actions of a stock,” Buffett says. “As long as Sam’s involved, I’ll be involved. I promise you that.”
For his part, ElBaradei is ecstatic that Buffett stepped forward. But he also regards it as a damning reflection on the seriousness with which the world is taking nuclear proliferation. “It’s discouraging, to say the least, for my organization to go and pass the hat to seek funding for these problems when everyone agrees that this is the No. 1 security threat,” ElBaradei says. “Governments are not putting money where their mouths are.”
Last month, Nunn wrote an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal with former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz and former Secretary of Defense William Perry that sent waves through the foreign-policy establishment. Its title was “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.” The article declared that, after the cold war, “reliance on nuclear weapons for [deterrence] is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.” Deterring terrorist groups has become nearly impossible, and the peacekeeping value of nuclear weapons is more and more outweighed by the risk of their possible use. Therefore, the authors wrote, it is time to pursue the goal of “a world free of nuclear weapons.” To seek abolition, in other words.
The language used in the op-ed — for example, the claim that abolition is “consistent with America’s moral heritage” — struck some as an echo of 1980s liberal critiques that treated nuclear deterrence as a moral abomination. “Many people said this was a leftist view, a pacifist view of the world, to come and say we need to move to a new abolition of nuclear weapons,” ElBaradei told me shortly after the piece was published. On the other hand, Nunn’s byline on the article seems to have buoyed those who have long called for weapons reductions. “Here is a man who was known as the leading Democratic hawk in the Senate saying we have got to recapture this vision of eliminating nuclear weapons,” Joseph Cirincione, a nuclear-proliferation expert at the liberal Center for American Progress, says. “Not just reducing nuclear dangers but eliminating these weapons. It was a shot in the arm to everyone who’s been trying to correct the disastrous policies of the last six years.”
Nunn says that some people were stunned by his new stance. “How could you endorse this?” he has been asked. Ronald Reagan believed passionately in the principle of disarmament, but few in Washington’s foreign-policy establishment have ever shared that view. Brent Scowcroft, for one, calls abolition “a fantasy. But even if you could do it, that’s dangerous. I just think that we have invented nuclear weapons, and we cannot disinvent them. And a world where everybody gets rid of their nuclear weapons means that anybody that cheats can become a superpower in a short period of time. And I just think that’s a very dangerous world.”
Nunn acknowledges this danger and admits that any realistic disarmament plan would have to allow the U.S. to quickly reconstitute weapons if a threat emerged. But he has come to believe the greater danger is continuing on our current path. “I think we have to turn it around,” he told me a few weeks ago. “You literally can’t get there” — to a safer world, that is — “from here.”
Nunn concedes that any path to complete disarmament would be long and slow. He says that the U.S. could begin by finally starting to make substantial cuts in its nuclear forces, and by ratifying a 1996 international nuclear-test-ban treaty that Congress has refused to ratify, and by working to halt the production of new fissile material everywhere. But only a sweeping vision of a world free from the bomb can start such a process, Nunn says. “I don’t believe the steps are possible without the vision.”
It has been a long journey to this point. Twenty years ago, he says, the Wall Street Journal article “would not have been possible. I would not have been in that mood at that stage, and I said so.” Today, in fact, Nunn finds himself unexpectedly aligned with the original abolitionist vision that he only recently urged Ted Turner to de-emphasize. It is a vision many Democrats say Nunn could bring into a future Democratic administration, possibly as secretary of state or defense. (In a recent speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Hillary Clinton cited Nunn and the N.T.I. as her inspiration for a bill to create a White House nuclear-terrorism adviser.)
But Nunn knows it could be another 20 years — probably more — before such a vision can be realized, if at all. “You can probably only get to the achievement with the next generation,” he says. “Probably none of the people who signed that will be able to see it through. But the world has to see that direction. Perhaps then a younger generation will see that the goal is achievable.”
Michael Crowley is a senior editor at The New Republic.
Correction: February 24, 2007
An article on Page 50 of The Times Magazine this weekend, about Sam Nunn, head of the Nuclear Threat Initiative and former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, misstates the name of a company on whose board he serves. It is Chevron, not ChevronTexaco. The article also misspells the surname of a former secretary of state with whom Nunn and others wrote a recent op-ed article for The Wall Street Journal. He is George P. Shultz, not Schulz. And the article misspells the surname of the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency in several references. He is Mohamed ElBaradei, not ElBaredei.
Jessica Dimmock for The New York TimesMIXMASTERS The Aphilliates’ inner circle, in their Atlanta studio, from left: Willie the Kid, DJ Drama, Jay Stevenson (the studio engineer), DJ Sense, DJ Don Cannon.
Hip-Hop Outlaw (Industry Version)
Late in the afternoon of Jan. 16, a SWAT team from the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, backed up by officers from the Clayton County Sheriff’s Office and the local police department, along with a few drug-sniffing dogs, burst into a unmarked recording studio on a short, quiet street in an industrial neighborhood near the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. The officers entered with their guns drawn; the local police chief said later that they were “prepared for the worst.” They had come to serve a warrant for the arrest of the studio’s owners on the grounds that they had violated the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law, or RICO, a charge often used to lock up people who make a business of selling drugs or breaking people’s arms to extort money. The officers confiscated recording equipment, cars, computers and bank statements along with more than 25,000 music CDs. Two of the three owners of the studio, Tyree Simmons, who is 28, and Donald Cannon, who is 27, were arrested and held overnight in the Fulton County jail. Eight employees, mostly interns from local colleges, were briefly detained as well.
Later that night, a reporter for the local Fox TV station, Stacey Elgin, delivered a report on the raid from the darkened street in front of the studio. She announced that the owners of the studio, known professionally as DJ Drama and DJ Don Cannon, were arrested for making “illegal CDs.” The report cut to an interview with Matthew Kilgo, an official with the Recording Industry Association of America, who was involved in the raid. The R.I.A.A., a trade and lobbying group that represents the major American record labels, works closely with the Department of Justice and local police departments to crack down on illegal downloading and music piracy, which most record-company executives see as a dire threat to their business.
Kilgo works in the R.I.A.A.’s Atlanta office, and in the weeks before the raid, the local police chief said, R.I.A.A. investigators helped the police collect evidence and conduct surveillance at the studio. Kilgo consulted with the R.I.A.A.’s national headquarters in advance of the raid, and after the raid, a team of men wearing R.I.A.A. jackets was responsible for boxing the CDs and carting them to a warehouse for examination.
If anyone involved with the raid knew that the men they had arrested were two of the most famous D.J.’s in the country, they didn’t let on while the cameras were rolling. For local law enforcement, the raid on Drama and Cannon’s studio was no different from a raid they executed in October on an Atlanta factory where a team of illegal immigrants was found making thousands of copies of popular DVDs and CDs to sell on the street. Along with the bootlegged CDs, the police found weapons and a stash of drugs in the factory. (The Fox report on the DJ Drama raid included a shot of a grave-looking police officer saying, “In this case we didn’t find drugs or weapons, but it’s not uncommon for us to find other contraband.”)
But Drama and Cannon’s studio was not a bootlegging plant; it was a place where successful new hip-hop CDs were regularly produced and distributed. Drama and Cannon are part of a well-regarded D.J. collective called the Aphilliates. Although their business almost certainly violated federal copyright law, as well as a Georgia state law that requires CDs to be labeled with the name and address of the producers, they were not simply stealing from the major labels; they were part of an alternative distribution system that the mainstream record industry uses to promote and market hip-hop artists. Drama and Cannon have in recent years been paid by the same companies that paid Kilgo to help arrest them.
The CDs made in the Aphilliates’ studio are called mixtapes — album-length compilations of 20 or so songs, often connected by a theme; they are produced and mixed by a D.J. and usually “hosted” by a rapper, well known or up-and-coming, who peppers the disc with short boasts, shout-outs or promotions for an upcoming album. Some mixtapes are part of an ongoing series — in the last few years, the Aphilliates have produced 16 numbered installments of “Gangsta Grillz,” an award-winning series that focuses on Southern hip-hop; others represent a one-time deal, a quick way for a rapper to respond to an insult or to remind fans he exists between album releases. The CDs are packaged in thin plastic jewel cases with low-quality covers and are sold at flea markets and independent record stores and through online clearinghouses like mixtapekingz.com. A mixtape can consist of remixes of hit songs — for instance, the Aphilliates offered a CD of classic Michael Jackson songs doctored by a Detroit D.J. Or it can feature a rapper “freestyling,” or improvising raps, over the beat from another artist’s song; so, on one mixtape, LL Cool J’s “Love You Better” became 50 Cent’s “After My Cheddar.” In most cases, the D.J. modifies the original song without acquiring the rights to it, and if he wants to throw in a sample of Ray Charles singing or a line from a Bugs Bunny cartoon, he doesn’t worry about copyright. The language on mixtapes is raw and uncensored; rappers sometimes devote a whole CD to insulting another rapper by name. Mixtapes also feature unreleased songs, often “leaked” to the D.J. by a record label that wants to test an artist’s popularity or build hype for a coming album release. Record labels regularly hire mixtape D.J.’s to produce CDs featuring a specific artist. In many cases, these arrangements are conducted with a wink and a nod rather than with a contract; the label doesn’t officially grant the D.J. the right to distribute the artist’s songs or formally allow the artist to record work outside of his contract.
In December, not long before the bust, I spent a week with DJ Drama and the Aphilliates in Atlanta. The D.J.’s are true celebrities in the city’s vibrant hip-hop community. They were seated at the V.I.P. tables at nightclubs and parties and surrounded by fans at strip clubs, which in Atlanta are considered crucial venues for new hip-hop; tracks are often given their first spins while strippers frantically shake their behinds.
Although the music that the Aphilliates promote glorifies violence and drug dealing — one of their trademark Gangsta Grillz sound effects is a few shots fired by a gun with a silencer, followed by the thud of a body dropping — they did not live a gangster lifestyle. (Drama often rose at 8 a.m. to take his oldest daughter to kindergarten at a private school.) Instead, they seemed to be aspiring young music executives with a long-term business plan who had figured out a faster and more lucrative way to make it big than an internship at a record label.
The success of “Gangsta Grillz” had secured for the Aphilliates their own radio shows and record contracts, as well as endorsement deals with Pepsi and clothing companies. When I visited, the Aphilliates were working on an “official” Gangsta Grillz release, to be distributed by Grand Hustle, part of Atlantic Records; Drama said it would use only licensed songs and cleared samples. In September, the Aphilliates signed a partnership deal with Asylum Records, part of Warner Music Group, to distribute albums that Drama and Cannon would produce.
DJ Drama knew that aspects of his business were in what he described to me as “a legal gray area,” and he was secretive about even the most basic facts of how the Aphilliates ran their business. He allowed that he had “got rich” because of his reputation as a mixtape D.J., though he would not even admit to me that he actually sold mixtapes. The line between self-promotion and secrecy was sometimes an awkward one for him to walk, especially as his underground CDs moved further into the mainstream. Several small distributors had begun selling Drama’s CDs, repackaged with scannable barcodes, to major retailers like Best Buy.
One of the CDs confiscated by R.I.A.A. investigators during the Atlanta raid was “Dedication 2,” a mixtape that DJ Drama made with Lil Wayne, a New Orleans rapper; it appeared on the Billboard hip-hop and R&B charts and was widely reviewed in the mainstream press. (Kelefa Sanneh of The New York Times chose “Dedication 2″ as one of the 10 best recordings of 2006.) As the R.I.A.A. agents boxed up Drama’s stash of “Dedication 2,” the CD continued to sell well at major retailers like Best Buy and FYE (a national chain of record stores) and also at the iTunes Store online.
The local Fox report of the bust was posted on the Internet and widely viewed. The spectacle of men who were known to every hip-hop fan as players in the mainstream music industry being arrested with the aid of the enforcement arm of that same industry was so bizarre and unexpected that a handful of conspiracy theories quickly arose to explain what had happened. Some fans speculated on message boards that the D.J.’s must have been running other illegal businesses on the side. There were others who thought that the bust was payback from a small distributor who had recently sued DJ Drama for violating a contract. But most fans simply thought the men were victims of a music industry that didn’t understand hip-hop. The day after Drama’s arrest, fans circulated on the Internet a stylized image of Drama’s face over a caption that said “Free Drama and Cannon.” Mixunit.com, the biggest Web distributor of mixtapes, removed its entire stock from the site and posted pictures of Drama and Cannon on its main page with the message, “Free the D.J.’s.” A member of the Diplomats, a Harlem hip-hop group, told MTV News that Jan. 16 was “D-day in hip-hop.” Some fans said that in protest they’d never buy another label release; a New York City radio D.J. called record labels the ultimate “snitches.”
Lil Wayne, who made “Dedication 2″ with Drama, said in an interview that Drama would have to “play the game fair,” adding that he thought it was unfortunate that sometimes mixtapes outsell an artist’s official label releases, cutting into the artist’s royalties. Soon after, Rapmullet.com, one of the most prominent mixtape Web sites, posted an image of Wayne on its home page over the words: “Is Wayne a traitor? Did he side with the suits? We didn’t abandon Drama — will you? Who’s next to jump ship?”
Drama is the public face of the Aphilliates, but he, Cannon and their third partner, DJ Sense (a k a Brandon Douglas, 26) function as a team; all three are the hosts of a weekly radio show broadcast on WHTA, an Atlanta hip-hop and R&B station, and another Gangsta Grillz show on Sirius satellite radio, and they jointly own the Aphilliates Music Group. The men have been friends since they met at college a decade ago, and they have an easy rhythm with one another, like teammates who play pickup basketball every week and can pass or negotiate a pick without making eye contact. All three wear the collective’s signature neck chain with a diamond-encrusted pendant in the shape of the letter A.
Drama, whose mother is a white education professor and whose father is a black civil rights activist, has expressive brown eyes and a closely trimmed beard. He usually wears a baseball cap backward or propped loosely atop his light brown hair, cocked to the side. Although his workday rarely starts before noon, he comes across as a savvy businessman. Most of the time he doesn’t say much, but it’s clear he is always paying close attention to what is going on around him. When he is in the studio, about to lay down a Gangsta Grillz “drop” (a phrase that is repeated throughout a mixtape), or when he has to tell a bouncer that no, he won’t stand behind that velvet rope, he rocks back and forth, building his energy, then barks out a torrent of speech, after which he seems to retreat back into himself again. He has a quiet, focused energy that can seem gruff; around Sense and Cannon, though, he gets goofy.
Cannon is a huge guy — 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds — with a lumbering gait and a sweet, unguarded smile. He sometimes spends 24 hours at a stretch in the studio, hunched over a mixing board and a computer running Pro Tools, taking breaks to play video games. He loves to shop, and he especially likes to visit high-end Atlanta malls to buy Prada cologne and examine the jewelry. His enormous sneaker collection takes up the bulk of his apartment’s walk-in closet, as well as the trunk of his Chevy Tahoe S.U.V. and most of a storage space he rents by the month.
Sense is known as the visionary with the business ideas, the one who operates mostly behind the scenes. He is short and just a little bit nerdy. Once when we were in the studio at WHTA, a D.J. named Mami Chula wandered in while a song was playing. She gave Sense a look, shook her head and mused aloud, “I just never saw someone with such a small head.” Sense didn’t say anything, just gave her an indignant look. It seemed as if he was accustomed to being teased.
The day after the raid, when Drama and Cannon were each released from jail on $100,000 bonds, they drove straight to the WHTA studios, went on the air and promoted their coming label releases. There’s a video on YouTube that shows the scene: Drama swaggers into the studio in a white T-shirt and a gray zip-up track-suit jacket, his diamond “A” chain swinging across his chest.
The D.J.’s on air were known as the Durrty Boyz, and one of them announced that they had an “exclusive interview to find out what the hell is going on with Gangsta Grillz.” He asked the accused felons to get close to the microphone.
Cannon murmured: “It’s Don Cannon. Holla at me.”
DJ Sense, who also goes by the name Trendsetter, said: “Yeah, yeah, you know what it is. The boy T-t-t-t-t-t-trendsetta! Holla at your boy!”
Drama, who sometimes calls himself “Mr. Thanksgiving” because, he says, he “feeds the whole industry,” said: “Thanksgiving is every year, man. It doesn’t go nowhere. Do you understand what that means? It’s a holiday, it’s every year. . . . It’s not going nowhere. DJ Drama! I am in full effect.”
After the Durrty Boyz spun a Ying Yang Twins song, Drama took calls at a rapid clip, and he responded to nearly every question or message of support with a reminder of the Aphilliates’ coming Gangsta Grillz release on Atlantic.
One female caller, particularly incensed, demanded, “Can I speak to Drama?”
“What’s up?” Drama asked. “What’s good?”
“Drama, what happened? . . . I mean, come on now, you went to jail?”
“I mean, for a quick minute,” Drama replied. “I am home, though.”
“Uh-uh! We ain’t having that. Don Cannon, Trendsetter, do I need to fight somebody?”
“We’re gonna need you,” Drama said. “We’re gonna start a whole campaign. . . . You know the Gangsta Grillz album is coming out, right?”
“Oh, for real?”
In 1996, Sense and Drama, then both freshmen majoring in mass communications, met in Brawley Hall, their dorm at Clark Atlanta University. C.A.U. is part of the country’s largest consortium of historically black colleges, directly abutting Morehouse and Spelman. Drama and Sense were both aspiring D.J.’s, and they were both from Philadelphia. After they met, they competed in a local D.J. battle and became friends. The following year they met Cannon, also a D.J. from Philadelphia (“Aphilliates” combines the Phil of Philadelphia with an A for Atlanta), and the three became inseparable. Each D.J. found his own niche: Sense interned at WHTA, Cannon spun records at college parties and Drama started selling his own mixtapes. Every night in his apartment, Drama made 10 copies of his latest cassette, and the next day he brought them to campus. Between classes, he would set up a cheap yellow boom box on a major promenade at C.A.U. known as the Strip and offer tapes for sale. He also sold tapes at Georgia State, where he would tell customers that the identity of DJ Drama was a mystery. “I’d tell them I never met Drama, I don’t know the guy, I just work for him,” he told me.
In his junior year, in 1998, Drama put together a compilation of Southern hip-hop, which was beginning to emerge nationally as a distinct sound and style. Often called dirty South, it was more dance-oriented and melodic and raunchier than hip-hop from either coast. That mixtape, “Jim Crow Laws,” sold well, and Drama decided to start a Southern series, which he named Gangsta Grillz. Amateur mistakes were made early on — “we actually spelled ‘Grillz’ with an S,” Drama recalled — but the series quickly took off. Through Sense, Drama met a young local rapper named Lil Jon, who had helped invent a frenetic new style of hip-hop known as crunk. Drama asked Lil Jon to be the host of a mixtape, and Jon did a manic series of drops throughout Gangsta Grillz No. 4. It was the first CD that Drama was able to get into stores.
Around the time Drama was hitting his stride, a young entrepreneur named Jason Geter was working as a manager for T.I., then a little-known artist from Atlanta’s Bankhead housing projects signed to an imprint of Arista. Geter wasn’t happy with the label’s marketing of T.I.’s first album, so he undertook his own promotions, independently shooting a video and printing up T-shirts. Geter said that he started seeing Drama’s mixtapes everywhere — in barbershops and record stores. (“Drama was the most consistent guy doing mixtapes in Atlanta,” he told me. “Some of the other people didn’t even have covers for the CDs, but Drama stood out.”) One night Geter called Drama and asked if he could bring T.I. by Drama’s home studio to do some drops and freestyles on a mixtape.
Drama was ecstatic. “At that point, no one was really checking for me,” he told me. “I hadn’t had a call in three months.” After the impromptu recording session, Geter started giving Drama unreleased T.I. songs and eventually asked him to produce and release a whole CD of T.I.’s work. When T.I.’s mixtape “Down With the King” sold well, other managers started taking their artists to Drama’s studio. The first mixtape Drama was paid by a label to produce was “Tha Streetz Iz Watchin,” which Def Jam’s CTE label hired him to make with Young Jeezy in 2004, in order to build up hype for a coming CD. When Jeezy’s official release, “Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101,” came out in 2005, bearing a bonus track from the Drama mixtape, it sold two million copies.
At least once a week last fall, Jason Brown, the 30-year-old promotions director for the Aphilliates, could be found making a circuit of Atlanta with boxes of Drama’s new releases stacked in the back of his Chevy Tahoe. The trip often took as long as nine hours. The Thursday I rode with Brown, he was carrying copies of two mixtapes Drama had recently recorded in the studio with Lil Keke and Lil Boosie, who are popular in their home regions — Louisiana and South Texas, respectively — but have not yet broken out nationally. Brown drove down the parkways and roads of Atlanta’s low-income black suburbs, past a landscape of Waffle Houses, custom rim shops and halal meat stores, stopping in with his wares at flea markets and little mom-and-pop record shops.
At around 3 p.m., we pulled into the parking lot of Backstage Records, a small, tidy shop across the street from the Greenbriar Mall, a locale frequently mentioned in hip-hop lyrics. (Ludacris: “Any charges set against me, chunk it up and stand tall/Next year I’m lookin’ into buyin’ Greenbriar Mall.”) Brown tucked a stack of CDs under each arm and headed into the store. He greeted the owner, a short broad man in his late 20s named Vic XL.
“How many you want?” Brown asked XL, holding out the Keke and Boosie CDs.
“Whoa!” XL said, excited. “Boosie is overdue for a mixtape.” XL told me that Boosie’s major-label release, “Bad Azz,” on Asylum Records, was not selling well, but, he explained, “he’s a hood artist,” so that wasn’t a big surprise.
XL inspected both discs and placed his order: “I’m gonna take five.” As Brown started to count CDs off his pile, XL looked again at the liner notes and reconsidered: “No, 10 each.”
A small record store like Backstage rarely orders more than 10 copies of any CD, and Drama’s distribution system meets XL’s needs better than the mainstream distribution system does. If XL wants just 10 copies of the new Lil Scrappy CD, he can’t buy them directly from the label’s distributors as chains like Best Buy do. Instead, he has to go through a middleman called a one-stop, which charges XL $10.75 for a CD that retails at Best Buy for $9.99.
The economics of mixtapes appeal to XL, and so do their politics; as he sees it, mixtapes undermine the power of major record labels and radio stations. “Most artists can’t afford to get their music on the radio, but an artist has the right to let his fan base hear what he’s done,” XL said. “Who is the label to dictate how to feed the fan base?”
Mixtapes have long played an important role in hip-hop. In the late 1970s, before rap music was ever recorded onto vinyl or played on a radio station, people found out about hip-hop acts through live recordings of D.J. sets from block parties or clubs. Those cassette recordings were duplicated by hand and sold on the street or in record stores, and given free to gypsy-cab drivers in the Bronx as promotional tools. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, mixtapes remained an important subculture. In the last five years, though, they have risen to a more prominent place in the industry and made the most successful D.J.’s rich.
Mixtapes fill a void left by the consolidation of record labels and radio stations. In the mid-1990s, sales of independent hip-hop albums exceeded those from major releases. But those smaller independent labels were bought out by major labels, and in the late ’90s, the last major independent distributor collapsed. This left few routes for unknown hip-hop artists to enter the market; it also made the stakes higher for major labels, which wanted a better return on their investment. As Jeff Chang, author of “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop,” a history of hip-hop, told me recently, “The whole industry shifted to massive economies of scale, and mixtapes are a natural outgrowth and response to that.”
Mixtape D.J.’s came to be seen as the first tier of promotions for hip-hop artists, a stepping stone to radio play. Labels began aiding and abetting mixtape D.J.’s, sending them separate digital tracks of vocals and beats from songs so they could be easily remixed. They also started sending copies of an artist’s mixtape out to journalists and reviewers along with the official label release. DJ Chuck T, a mixtape D.J. in South Carolina, told me that when label employees send him tracks to include on his mixtapes, they request a copy of the mixtape so that they can show their bosses the track is “getting spin from the street.” He also said record-label promoters want sales figures for his mixtapes so they can chart sales patterns, which they use in marketing their own releases.
Mixtape D.J.’s have effectively absorbed many of the functions of an A&R department, the branch of a record label that traditionally discovers and develops new talent. Ron Stewart, a promotions coordinator at Jive Records, a subsidiary of Sony BMG Music, told me he prefers to test new artists out on mixtapes. “Budget permitting,” he said, “we’d do a few mixtapes with a few D.J.’s, because they have different audiences in different regions.” Labels prefer to use established mixtape D.J.’s like Drama, rather than produce promotional CDs themselves, Stewart said, because “the best D.J.’s have a better brand than the average label does.”
Although the deals are informal and often secret, labels typically pay a prominent D.J. like Drama $10,000 to $15,000 to produce a mixtape for an artist. The label’s representatives, Stewart explained, adopt what amounts to a don’t ask, don’t tell policy about the D.J.’s plans to sell the work; what the D.J. does with his copy of the master, Stewart said, “is his own business.” For successful D.J.’s, mixtape sales can bring considerable revenue. Mixtapes sell for anywhere from $5 to $10 on the street or on a Web site like Mixunit, and overhead is low, since the CDs cost only about 50 cents to manufacture and D.J.’s rarely pay royalties or licensing fees.
Although many hip-hop artists view mixtapes as an essential way to build their careers, some are critical of aspects of the system. One editor of a hip-hop magazine, who would comment only anonymously, told me: “In the aftermath of the raid, talking to artists, the stuff they say when Drama’s not around — there is a little bit of animosity, because he is clearly making money off these artists. They all saw his car being towed off on TV. What was it? A Maserati?”
Killer Mike, an Atlanta rapper who is signed to Sony and who has been featured on a number of DJ Drama’s mixtapes, told me he is not really a “supporter” of mixtapes. “That doesn’t mean I don’t play mixtapes in my car and listen to other peoples’ mixtapes, but as an artist, I feel the amount of rhymes you have to write to put out a mixtape is the same amount you have to for an album,” he said. “I’d rather put out albums over my own beats than use other people’s beats and have a problem later.”
Pimp C, a Texas rapper who is half of the popular underground hip-hop duo UGK, has repeatedly refused to participate in a UGK mixtape despite requests by his record label and, he said, from countless mixtape D.J.’s. Pimp C told me that because there is no paper trail, mixtape D.J.’s are able to invent sales figures, and they routinely claim that, after their overhead, they just break even. But based on his experience producing two of his own mixtapes, Pimp C suspects D.J.’s make plenty; they just don’t want to give artist a cut. “Every time I was approached by a mixtape D.J., they tried to sell me the dream there was no money in it, and it was something artists need to do to help their album sales,” he said. “But I know how much bread can be made. . . . If you’re making money, chop it up with me.”
Before DJ Drama went to jail, no mixtape D.J. had been the target of a major raid; busts had been directed at small retailers, like Mondo Kim’s in New York’s East Village. Jonathan Lamy, a spokesperson for the R.I.A.A., said the raid on Drama’s studio represented no official change in policy and had been undertaken only at the behest of Atlanta law enforcement. But for many in the industry, the focus on a single prominent figure seemed like no accident. “Arresting them criminally under RICO was firing a warning shot at anyone who has mixtapes,” said Walter McDonough, a copyright lawyer who has negotiated with the R.I.A.A. on behalf of Jay-Z.
Others pointed to the selective nature of the crackdown as evidence that the raid was a deliberate effort — major retailers like Best Buy were not raided, even though they carry many of the same CDs Drama was arrested for selling. The R.I.A.A. “would have to know nothing about the industry they are monitoring not to realize this stuff is all over Best Buy and FYE,” says Eric Steuer, the creative director of Creative Commons, a nonprofit that works to develop more flexible copyright arrangements for artists and producers. “Maybe they leave them alone because the major chains have promotion deals with record labels.”
Ted Cohen, a former executive at EMI Records who now runs a music-consulting business, told me that the raid was typical of the music industry’s “schizophrenic” approach to promotions; a label’s marketing department wants to get its artists’ songs in front of as many people as possible, even if it means allowing or ignoring free downloads or unlicensed videos on YouTube. But the business department wants to collect royalties. “It is a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing,” Cohen said.
Drama’s arrest shook up mixtape D.J.’s and promoters across the country. But even in the days immediately following the raid, D.J.’s continued to release tapes — some with hastily added tracks on which rappers cursed the R.I.A.A. — and major labels continued to e-mail them new tracks. Some in the industry speculated that things would have to change, that mixtapes would either move further underground or become legitimate licensed products. But no one I spoke with thought the arrest would permanently damage Drama’s career. In fact, Julia Beverly, the editor of Ozone, a Southern hip-hop magazine, suggested that it was more likely to improve his image and album sales. “Really, this takes him to a gangsta level,” she said. “It gives him a little something extra. It’s messed up, but if someone goes to jail or dies, it elevates his status and just makes him more of a star than he was before. That’s the way the entertainment industry works in general. So, having cops at your door with M-16′s at your head, and MTV News reporting on the raid, calling you the biggest D.J. in the world? You can’t pay for that type of look.”
Samantha M. Shapiro is a contributing writer.
$45 Billion Bid for a Texas Utility in Biggest Buyout Ever
The biggest leveraged buyout ever is about to be surpassed. Again.
A group led by two private-equity giants, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company and the Texas Pacific Group, is near a deal to acquire the TXU Corporation, a Texas utility company, for about $45 billion, according to people involved in the talks.
The amount of private money that is being offered is a huge financial endorsement of the company’s controversial energy strategy. TXU has riled environmental advocates by proposing to build 11 coal-fired power plants in Texas. Despite calls for regulating greenhouse gases, TXU has been the most aggressive in the power industry in pushing coal as the answer to growing electricity demands. Nationwide, power companies are planning to build about 150 coal power plants over the next several years.
The deal itself, if approved at a TXU board meeting on Sunday, would be a landmark. It would exceed the Blackstone Group’s recent $39 billion acquisition of the office landlord Equity Office Properties, which currently holds the crown as the largest buyout ever. And that would mean that Henry R. Kravis, a co-founder of Kohlberg Kravis, has managed to upstage, at least for the time being, his longtime rival in deals, Stephen Schwarzman, a co-founder of Blackstone.
Energy has been fairly recent territory for private equity. While energy deals accounted for 16 percent of all mergers last year, only 9 percent of those deals involved buyout firms, according to Thomson Financial. The first big foray came last year, when Kinder Morgan, the Texas pipeline giant that was created from the former Enron, was sold to a group that included Goldman Sachs, the American International Group, the Carlyle Group and Riverstone Holdings for $27.5 billion.
Awash in hundreds of billions of cash, private equity firms, which raise money from pension funds and wealthy individuals, have taken on new targets in an extraordinary buying spree. In 2006, private equity firms raised more than $174 billion for 205 funds, according to Thomson Financial.
Having just finished raising new super-size funds — Kohlberg Kravis and Blackstone are about to complete new funds each worth more than $20 billion — and with banks and hedge funds willing to lend them money in record amounts with few restrictions or covenants, private equity has now begun to target even bigger prey. A deal the size of TXU will likely require that the private equity firms raise more than $30 billion in debt.
People involved in the talks cautioned that the deal still had to be approved by TXU’s board and several negotiating points still remained, making it possible that the talks could collapse.
TXU did not respond to telephone requests for comment.
“Its a pretty dramatic development because TXU’s position in electricity in Texas is controversial and uncertain,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy expert at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston.
TXU, based in Dallas, has 2.4 million customers in the state. With its large, low-cost nuclear and coal-fired fleet, it has been able to raise electricity prices to match the rise in natural gas prices the last three years.
Canadian Court Limits Detention in Terror Cases
OTTAWA, Feb. 23 — Canada‘s highest court on Friday unanimously struck down a law that allows the Canadian government to detain foreign-born terrorism suspects indefinitely using secret evidence and without charges while their deportations are being reviewed.
The detention measure, the security certificate system, has been described by government lawyers as an important tool for combating international terrorism and maintaining Canada’s domestic security. Six men are now under threat of deportation without an open hearing under the certificates.
“The overarching principle of fundamental justice that applies here is this: before the state can detain people for significant periods of time, it must accord them a fair judicial process,” Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote in the ruling.
The three men who brought the case are likely to remain jailed or under strict parole because the court suspended its decision for a year to allow Parliament to introduce a law consistent with the ruling.
The decision reflected striking differences from the current legal climate in the United States. In the Military Commissions Act of 2006, Congress stripped the federal courts of authority to hear challenges, through petitions for writs of habeas corpus, to the open-ended confinement of foreign terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
A federal appeals court in Washington upheld the constitutionality of that law this week, dismissing 13 cases brought on behalf of 63 Guantánamo detainees. Their lawyers said they would file an appeal with the Supreme Court. In two earlier decisions, the justices ruled in favor of Guantánamo detainees on statutory grounds but did not address the deeper constitutional issues that this case appears to present.
At a news conference in Montreal, a defendant, Adil Charkaoui, praised the Canadian court’s decision.
“The Supreme Court, by 9 to 0, has said no to Guantánamo North in Canada,” said Mr. Charkaoui, who is under tightly controlled, electronically monitored house arrest.
Stockwell Day, the Canadian minister of public safety, said Friday, “It is our intention to follow the Supreme Court ruling.”
He added, “We are taking in stride what they did say and we will look at the changes that are necessary.”
The decision is also the latest in a series of events that has seen Canada reconsider some national security steps it took after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Last September, a judicial inquiry rebuked the police for falsely accusing a Syrian-born Canadian, Maher Arar, of terrorist connections. Those accusations, in 2002, led United States officials to fly Mr. Arar to Syria, where he was jailed and tortured. Earlier this year, the Canadian government reached a $9.75 million settlement with Mr. Arar and offered a formal apology. The commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police also resigned for reasons related to the affair.
Canada’s Parliament is divided over whether to continue two antiterrorism measures introduced in 2001 that are set to expire on March 1. The opposition Liberal Party, which had brought in the law, does not want to continue its special preventive arrest powers or the secret court hearings it permits, which resemble grand jury hearings in the United States. Two other portions of that law have been struck down by courts in Ontario.
“We’ve started to see the rollback,” said Alex Neve, the secretary general of Amnesty International Canada. “Today the Supreme Court of Canada has said, ‘Make sure you put human rights at the center of how you prevent terrorism.’ “
The security certificate system was introduced in a 1978 immigration law and has been used 27 times, mostly before September 2001. It allows the government to detain people indefinitely if the minister of public safety and the minister of immigration conclude that they are a threat to national security. The certificates, once signed, are reviewed by a federal judge who can rule to keep any or all of the evidence secret.
While Amnesty International and other groups have long campaigned against the certificates, the issue attracted relatively little attention for many years. Historically the certificates were issued against people who were accused of spying in Canada and who were swiftly deported.
The current cases, however, have become more prominent because they generally involve people who have been jailed for years without charges, using secret evidence and, in many cases, without bail.
The sparseness of evidence makes it difficult to assess if there is any connection linking the men. The authorities say they have tied five of them in various ways to Al Qaeda. A sixth was arrested in 1995 and has been out on bail since 1998. He is charged with being a fund-raiser for the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.
Hassan Almrei, a Syrian arrested in Mississauga, Ontario, in 2001, is the only one directly involved in this case who remains in jail.
A document from the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service charges that Mr. Almrei, who entered Canada on false papers in 1999, forged documents for the Sept. 11 attacks and is a member of “an international network of extremist groups and individuals who follow and support the Islamic extremist ideals espoused by Osama bin Laden.” He was also accused of sending money to Mr. bin Laden’s network through a honey and perfume business he ran in Saudi Arabia. The government said that a computer belonging to Mr. Almrei contained images of Mr. bin Laden, guns, a jet cockpit and a security badge.
Like most of the other suspects, Mr. Almrei remains under a certificate because the government’s efforts to deport him to Syria conflict with Canadian laws that ban sending people to places where they are likely to be tortured.
Based on the limited information available, other security certificate cases appear to be circumstantial. Mr. Charkaoui, a Moroccan who was arrested in 2002 and released on house arrest in 2005, is accused of having trained in Afghanistan.
“I am innocent,” he said Friday. “I was never charged, I was never accused of a crime. If the government has anything to accuse me of, well, there’s the criminal code.”
Much of the judgment provides a blueprint for Parliament on how to make security certificates fit with Canada’s charter of rights and freedoms. As part of that, one of the court’s suggestions seems to be adopted from Britain, whose legal system provided the basis of Canada’s. After the House of Lords struck down a similar law in 2004, Britain adopted a system that allows security-cleared lawyers to attend the hearings, review the evidence and represent the accused.
A provision of the ruling that is effective immediately requires people held under certificates to receive a bail hearing within 48 hours.
For terrorism suspects in the United States, whose situation is most directly analogous to that of the men in Canada, the legal situation is cloudy at best. In the two years after Sept. 11, 2001, the government detained more than 5,000 foreign citizens.
Most were charged with offenses no more serious than overstaying a tourist visa, and many were held for months, awaiting clearance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, after they had agreed to leave the country. Not one was convicted of a crime of terrorism.
Judge John Gleeson of Federal District Court in Brooklyn ruled last June on a class-action lawsuit brought by eight detainees. All have left the country and are seeking damages for what they argued was an illegitimate incarceration. Judge Gleeson dismissed that portion of the lawsuit, ruling that the courts should not “encroach on the executive branch in a realm where it has particular expertise” and “legitimate foreign policy considerations.”
Even if the plaintiffs could demonstrate that their right to constitutional due process was violated, Judge Gleeson wrote, the officials they sued would be entitled to immunity because any right to “immediate or prompt removal” had not been “clearly established” at the time. The case, Turkmen v. Gonzales, is now on appeal.
Dalia Hashad, the United States program director for Amnesty International, said the Canadian decision should serve as “a wake-up call that reminds us that civilized people follow a simple and basic rule of law, that indefinite detention is under no circumstances acceptable.”
Linda Greenhouse contributed reporting from Washington, and Christopher Mason from Ottawa.
